The Bureaucratic Sense of the Forthcoming in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul.” Journal for the History of Knowledge 1, No

Küçük, Harun. “The Bureaucratic Sense of the Forthcoming in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul.” Journal for the History of Knowledge 1, no. 1 (2020): 13, pp. 1–16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/jhk.22 SPECIAL ISSUE The Bureaucratic Sense of the Forthcoming in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul Harun Küçük University of Pennsylvania, US [email protected] In this article, I try to answer how the study of bureaucracy may contribute to the history of knowledge. In the broadest terms, the story goes like this: The Ottoman treasury had a difficult time collecting taxes in the seventeenth century. The administrators needed to have a sense of who to tax and how much to tax. To produce the necessary knowledge quickly, they had to rely on a small bureaucracy. And they had to do this without the help of a robust educational system. All of these issues implicated the relationship between knowledge and time. This article provides a preliminary investigation of bureaucratic numeracy with special emphasis on seventeenth-century Ottoman almanacs, or ruznames. I hope to give the reader an integrated understanding of what we usually treat separately as skills, bureaucratic practices, and, ultimately, the wireframe of statehood. I use the expression “sense of the forthcoming” instead of “knowledge of the future,” prognosis, or planning because first, “the forthcoming” was not simply about the natural passage of time but also about prognoses and expectations. Second, “sense” is more appropriate than knowledge because the forthcoming here also means an epistemic fore-closure. It suggests that knowledge may merely be “good enough,” especially at times of epistemic urgency, as was the case in seventeenth-century Istanbul. Some types of bureaucratic knowledge are fore-closed in that certainty or accuracy is simply not pursued beyond a certain point. This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen. Keywords: bureaucracy; astronomy; taxation; ottoman empire; seventeenth century Time is an important and fundamental element in the analysis of any society because time conventions are key components of social discipline and civility.1 We are living in a world where we can take time for granted because social discipline has become ingrained in our behavior after years and decades of habituation. Norbert Elias has even argued in his Essay on Time that we buy into the regular, Newtonian time-grid not because it inheres in our reason, but because we are forced into a regular time-grid from an early age.2 Time is always a part of bureaucratic knowledge. But, modern societies are not purely bureaucratic societies, and modern times are not purely bureaucratic times. Thus, for example, our calendars neither miss religious holidays, nor are they unscientific. The conglomerate that is the modern state has largely absorbed the religious and the scientific fields. Perhaps slightly less important today is work: work is less of a habitual time discipline today because fewer jobs are career jobs, and relatively few people do a job long enough to develop a rigorous time discipline based on that specific job, leaving us with the vague and vacuous “nine to five,” which, unless you live in a highly disciplined European nation, rarely starts at nine and ends at five. Finance, which relies heavily on the cyclical collection and payment of debt, is also a crucial element in our 1 Temporality is a relatively new line inquiry in Ottoman history. The only focused inquiry into time, work, and leisure in the early modern period is Sariyannis, “Temporal Modernization.” There are also some very notable studies on time that focus largely on the nineteenth century. See especially, Ogle, Global Transformation of Time; Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks; and Georgeon and Hitzel, Ottomans et le temps. 2 Elias, Essay on Time, 32. Art. 13, page 2 of 16 Küçük: The Bureaucratic Sense of the Forthcoming in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul contemporary understanding of time. Sociologist Lisa Adkins goes so far as to suggest that we think of the future in largely economic terms because the commodification of futures projects, creates, and enforces time.3 The religious field, the scientific field, the financial field, and the bureaucratic field constitute the modern state. They collectively put us through a type of civilizing process, which includes time discipline. According to Elias, only those polities that can enforce a regular time grid have a regular time grid.4 Elias is far from the only thinker to point out that there is a strong connection between societies and time. Charles Tilly, for example, has argued that political authorities shape time in three ways. First, they shape social time directly through employment, conscription, and other obligations foisted on subjects. Second, states consume their subject’ time by requiring them to pay taxes and answer official inquiries. And finally, states establish temporal references by erecting public clocks and publishing calendars.5 I will be touching on these in looking at tax collection practices and almanacs. Istanbul receives special emphasis partly because the Ottoman state employed close to fifteen percent of the half million inhabitants of the city and partly because bureaucrats, or at least bureaucratic instructions, were sent out from Istanbul. When Ottoman bureaucrats “civilized” an area under their administration, it meant enfolding that area into the central treasury and enforcing Istanbul’s temporal regime on it. Two elements need to be in place to enforce a regular time grid. First, you need to find one. In the seventeenth century, this was tantamount to finding a group of people who had already been habituated into a regular time grid. Yet, in this period there were no astronomers or astronomically-trained religious officials (ulema) in Istanbul, making bureaucrats the only people with some sense of a regular time grid.6 Second, you need to enforce the time grid, first through coercion, and then through habituation, which is a long process that takes generations. In the Ottoman Empire, a regular time grid whereby subjects become habituated to think in “state time” did not begin to emerge until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. By comparison, it was until almost a century after the publication of Newton’s Principia that Kant could claim that the regular Newtonian time grid was universal. Even then, perhaps Kant was exceptional rather than representative of the average European in his civility and punctuality. Since a regular time grid does not emerge instantaneously, I am trying to understand a “time grid in-the- making.” How would a somewhat regular time grid created by bureaucrats with a moderate amount of numeracy look? How would the bureaucrats who often could not directly access sources of tax revenue enforce this time grid? The examples I discuss in this article entail stripping away many of the fields that constitute the modern state—and the state was fairly naked in seventeenth-century Istanbul—and focusing on the fiscal bureaucracy. My analysis sits relatively easily within the existing literature on the reconstruction, formation, or adaptation of the Ottoman state after the social upheavals and the budgetary crises of the seventeenth century because it invariably locates these processes in the growth of the fiscal bureaucracy.7 Historian Mehmet Genç has gone so far as to say that the Ottomans thought about their economy in terms of the treasury because the vast majority of the documentary record we have from the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire is fiscal.8 The bureaucratic sense of the forthcoming points to the intertwined nature of the time grid and tax collection. I hope to give the reader an integrated understanding of what we usually treat as separate skills, bureaucratic practices, and, ultimately, the wireframe of statehood. The forthcoming was not simply about the passage of time but also about prognoses and expectations. There was no such thing as a pure calendar in seventeenth-century Istanbul, nor was it easy to separate tax collection and astrological prognoses because they were both in the calendar. Prominent astrologers and prominent tax bureaucrats were often the same people. Their understanding of the future was not an open-ended and iterative process; it was fore- closed.9 Their sense of the forthcoming was often merely “good enough” because they were facing times of epistemic urgencies—urgencies that most people who are not in the truth business, or even those who are in the truth business but under set deadlines, routinely experience. Many types of bureaucratic knowledge are fore-closed because bureaucrats stop pursuing further certainty or accuracy after a certain point. The cases I present overlap thematically and conceptually with John Sabapathy’s article on Gui Foucois in this issue. 3 Adkins, “Practice as Temporalisation,” 356. 4 Elias, Essay on Time, 45. 5 Tilly, “Time of States,” 275. 6 Küçük, Science without Leisure, 108–42. 7 See, e.g., Abou-el-Haj, Modern State; Tezcan, Second Ottoman Empire; Darling, Revenue-Raising. 8 Genç, Devlet ve Ekonomi, 60–62. 9 On epistemic closure, see Luper, “Epistemic Closure.” Küçük: The Bureaucratic Sense of the Forthcoming in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul Art. 13, page 3 of 16 From a comparative perspective, the Ottoman experience seems less than exceptional. For example, although James Scott’s Seeing like a State has nothing to say about the Ottoman Empire, it readily provides many insights that are useful as a baseline for the study of Ottoman taxation practices. For Scott, early modern states, especially absolutist states, were partially “blind” because they did not know how to “read” their subjects and their lands. Surveys, registers, standardization of weights and measures, and standardization of legal discourse mitigated this blindness.10 Indirect taxation was the rule rather than the exception.

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